Senior Sales Engineer

Primer AI•San Francisco, CA

17h

About The Position

Primer is hiring a Senior Sales Engineer to serve as the technical partner to its go-to-market team and help identify, shape, and win opportunities across government. The role works with Account Executives, Advisors, Partners, and Marketing to understand prospects’ missions, operational challenges, workflows, and desired outcomes, and to demonstrate how Primer’s solutions apply to them. The Senior Sales Engineer leads the technical side of the sales cycle, from discovery through demonstrations, prototypes, and proofs of concept. The role translates complex mission requirements into clear, compelling solutions and helps customers experience Primer’s value before purchasing. It requires quickly learning technical concepts, identifying obstacles early, and maintaining alignment and credibility with government stakeholders. The position also represents the customer’s technical perspective within account teams and partners with Product and Engineering on solutions, feature sets, and algorithmic development informed by customer engagement and feedback. Primer works closely with the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment; employment offers are conditioned on meeting applicable government contract requirements.

Requirements

5–7+ years of experience in sales engineering, solutions architecture, or customer-facing technical roles; enterprise software or AI sales experience is ideal.
Direct experience supporting Intelligence Community agencies or elements, such as CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, ODNI, or military service intelligence components.
Strong understanding of intelligence missions and analytic workflows, including the intelligence cycle, all-source analysis, OSINT, and how analysts collect, process, exploit, and disseminate information.
Experience with Intelligence Community technology procurement, including acquisition pathways such as OTAs, SBIRs, and IDIQs; contract vehicles; budget and program cycles; and moving capabilities from pilot to enterprise adoption.
Ability to connect analytic and mission outcomes to technical solutions and explain how AI can improve analyst speed, scale, and confidence while respecting analytic tradecraft standards.
Ability to explain complex AI concepts to analysts, engineers, mission owners, and program leadership.
Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic AI, including multi-agent workflows, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluating agent performance and reliability.
Grounding in NLP, including named-entity recognition (NER), entity resolution, and clustering, especially for multilingual and unstructured intelligence data.
Experience with graph databases such as Neo4j and with building or using knowledge graphs to model entities, relationships, networks, and events.
Experience deploying into Intelligence Community environments, including classified networks (JWICS, SIPRNet), IC cloud environments (C2E), on-premise environments, and air-gapped systems.
Experience with Docker and Elastic.
Understanding of IC security and accreditation requirements, including ICD 503, Authority to Operate (ATO) processes, FedRAMP, IL5/6, and FIPS.

Nice To Haves

Active TS/SCI clearance; Full-Scope or CI Polygraph strongly preferred.
Bachelor’s or advanced degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Prior service as an intelligence analyst, targeter, or technical officer within the IC or military intelligence.

Responsibilities

Show customers how Primer’s technical capabilities can support mission outcomes.
Represent the technical voice of the customer within account teams and develop strategies to improve customer mission outcomes.
Support the ideation and implementation of customer solutions and feature sets in partnership with Product and Engineering.
Work with Product and Engineering to identify and prioritize new features and algorithmic development based on customer engagement and feedback.
Lead the technical side of the sales cycle, including discovery, demonstrations, prototypes, and proofs of concept.
Translate complex mission requirements into clear solutions that demonstrate Primer’s value.

Benefits

Salary and Incentive Stock Options (ISOs).
Health, dental, and vision coverage.
401(k).
Unlimited paid time off and a flexible vacation policy.
Wellness Days.
100% paid leave for parents of growing families.
Book allowances and learning opportunities, including tech talks and brown bag lunches.
Fertility benefits through Carrot.
On-demand mental health coverage through Headspace Care+.
Gympass+ Membership via Wellhub.
One Medical Membership.
Remote work stipends.
Monthly internet allowance.